Devil in a Green Dress

Twenty minutes passed before I realized that she wasn't coming back, that she hadn't gone to the bathroom at all. Torn between the concert I had been looking forward to and the woman I thought I was in love with, I left. I was not at all surprised when I found her at the bar. She was not at all surprised to see me, as though she had left just to make sure I would follow.

It was a week or two later that the cop told me I should go home and forget about her. That I seemed like a bright young man who could do better. That she was nothing but trouble, had been for a while, and so was he. Her ex-boyfriend, that is. Or more accurately, her other boyfriend. When they finally found her hiding in a dresser drawer (no shit), he grabbed a steak knife and started cutting across his forearm. "Rodney," the cop said,"you're doing it wrong. You need to cut here, like this." To my dismay, Rodney dropped the knife.

Fool that I was back then, another couple of weeks later and we were staying up in the country while I drove into the city to work every day. It was at least a week and a half before I found out that another one of her admirers, a moron named Eric, had been sleeping in a shed and visiting her at the house while I was gone during the day. Bigger moron that I was, I gave him money for the bus and told him to get lost, only to be genuinely surprised that he was still there the next day. This time, I bought the ticket myself and watched him get on the bus.

The great flood ended my daily commute, and with it our stay in the country. When we got back to the city, she went off on her merry way, and I didn't see her again until she showed up at my apartment with Eric and a guy named Vic, whose intent was to rob me, which he did. I remember asking as he drove me to the bank machine, with a bunch of my stuff in the trunk of the stolen car, if he was going to kill me. I don't remember his answer, but I do remember finding myself surprised at how calmly I had asked. Needless to say, he didn't kill me.

Despite his warnings, I did report the crime, and didn't hear from her for another couple of weeks, when she called to say how sorry she was about what had happened. I told her to come over and we would talk about it. When she arrived, my roommate said he had to go to the store, and called the police from a neighbour's, as planned. I have never seen such sad eyes as the ones she looked at me with when they put the handcuffs on her. She had not expected this betrayal.

Of course I felt bad about the whole thing, sure that she hadn't known that Vic was going to rob me. So when the judge at the bail hearing read the usual condition about not communicating with the victim, I asked if that were really necessary. I was posting her bail, after all. At trial, she said that she didn't know that Vic was going to rob me until he did, and then was too scared to do anything other than go along with it. My testimony did not disprove this, and she was given the benefit of reasonable doubt. I left immediately upon hearing the verdict - I had just enough time to run to a nearby store to buy a modest bottle of bubbly and get back to the courthouse to offer it to her and her mother on their way out of the building.

Another couple of weeks later and she stood me up on what was supposed to be a romantic weekend in the country for her birthday. So I went up alone and smoked and drank and smoked some more and spun some vinyl and screamed at my ancestors until I passed out. I woke up with a wicked hangover and a cannabis fog, but something was missing. That uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that had been so familiar to me was gone. I wasn't worried about where she might be, wasn't concerned about who she might be doing, didn't seem to care about her any more at all.

Several months later, she called me out of the blue, and we had that weekend. It wasn't quite romantic; I felt no emotion towards her beyond physical attraction, and there was enough of that on both our parts not to care about anything else. A gentleman never tells, but she was no lady, and I'm okay with saying that we went at it like rabbits for two days until we could barely walk, and then we went at it some more. I never saw her again after that, nor ever wanted to. That weekend alone would have made all the other crap worthwhile if the cat hadn't already done that.